Big Tech is slowly, carefully creeping into banking

Big tech companies are dabbling in big finance and big banks are starting to notice. Amazon has loaned over a billion dollars to small businesses, Apple owns more corporate debt than some of the worlds biggest bond funds, and Google and Apple have gotten into the mobile payment business. Columnist Lionel Laurant wrote about this shift for Bloomberg. He talked with Marketplace’s Molly Wood about Big Tech creeping into the highly regulated world of banking. He says companies like Amazon and Apple face different challenges trying to disrupt the industry banking than they did disrupting retail, bookstores and media.

“I think it's a bit like the image of invading a castle or a fort. They've gone for the easy to disrupt, the least regulated businesses in the world, and they've done a very ferocious job of essentially tearing the rug out from old, established businesses that were not protected by big regulatory moats, and now we're getting to the hard part of the corporate landscape. These big tech companies, they've had a great decade, but they still need to grow.”